Can anyone explain the weird site statistics for me?

website statistics problem

[youngfish]

Hi, I recently purchased an advertisement at another site. Yesterday, my traffic seems growing a lot but there are still something weird:

I use webalizer to track the web stat, the info showed that the Hits,Files,Pages,Visits, Kbytes didn't change too much after I purchased the advertisement. But the Sites increased a lot (doubled).

Can anyone explain what happened?

Thanks a lot.

[jatar_k]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld youngfish,

not overly familiar with webalizer, does Sites mean referring sites? Was this ad on a single site or on a network of sites which might change the number of referring sites by a bunch.

[Webber]

I would like to know as well. What is the difference between hits, visits and sites?

[PatrickDeese]

Sites refers to unique IPs.

It is likely that you overall visitors did not increase very much because your site had a below average day, and the added traffic made up the difference.

Hits - how many times the webserver had a request for a file. A web page with 4 images would generate 5 hits in the log.

Visits: unique visitors - If I came to your site and looked at 10 pages, then left, I would be counted as one visitor.

Sites: unique IPs - AKA sessions, cumulative for the term of the report (the month). If I came back every day, using the same IP, the sites report would show my IP, plus the total number of files I requested, KB used, etc.

[JsnGrnlw]

sounds like you need a tool that understand marketing campaigns. *Most* free tools give you what you pay for.

I've tested a few programs and have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for.

Send me a sticky and I'll see what I can do to help you!

-Jason